As a Montana fishing guide, I spend nearly every day of the season helping our guests enjoy our blue ribbon wild trout rivers. The best fishing guides understand that the "catching" is only part of the experience of a fly fishing trip, but we also realize that putting a few trout in the net never hurts! Over time I have come to rely on a few simple tweaks that are easy for most anglers to make. These easy tips don't require learning new casting techniques and they can quickly produce a lot more volume after a day of fishing.

Use foam patterns when fishing dry flies

I still fish a lot of great traditional patterns like the stimulator and royal wulff when fishing attractor dry flies and fur ants or Dave's hoppers for terrestrials, but I have come to rely more and more on foam patterns when guiding. The beauty of foam patterns is that they never sink! By the end of the day this results in your flies spending more time on the water and lest time in the air. Even a high floating hair wing attractor like a parachute madam X can eventually get water logged or pulled under water on a strong mend. When a foam hopper gets pulled under while mending it just floats back to the surface allowing the drift to continue without a new cast. Foam flies simply spend more time on the water and result in more trout to the net by the end of the day.

Reduce the weight on your leader when nymph fishing

During most of the late spring, summer and early fall the metabolism of trout is in high gear and they are willing to move a bit for your subsurface presentations. Many anglers make the mistake of fishing too much weight on their nymph rigs with the idea that they need to be scraping the bottom with their flies. Nymphs do not always need to be right on the bottom since trout will frequently move up in the water column to intercept them. If your flies spend less time on the bottom they also get snagged less resulting in more fishing time. Removing some weight also results in less tangles while casting which also effectively increases the amount of time that you are actually "fishing" during the course of a day. Finally, strikes are easier to detect since you are spending less time trying to decipher the difference between a tick on the bottom and a take. When you are constantly bumping bottom you either false set which ends a drift, or assume that some takes are rocks and don't set the hook at all.

Use less false casts between presentations
Montana fly fishing guides hate to see good water float by while their clients are making false casts. Many fly fisherman get into a rhythm when casting and often make many more false casts than needed between their presentations to the trout. False casts should only be made when a dry fly needs to be aired out or the effective length of the cast needs to be changed. Often a simple up and down cast is all that is needed to reposition the flies. By consciously focusing to reduce your false casting as much as possible your flies will spend a higher percentage of the day in the "trout zone" and result in more hook ups.